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Taipei, Taiwan – May 31st, 2017 – AIC Inc., (from now on referred to as “AIC”) a leading player in server and storage solutions industry worldwide, will bring out the whole series of products at 2017 Computex Taipei, (05/30~06/03/2017), on the fourth floor of Nangang Exhibition Hall. With a separate zone for All-Flash-Array NVMe products, AIC will showcase a complete product line of All-Flash-Array NVMe storage servers, including a 1U 10-Bay server, 2U 24-Bay server which supports Single/Dual-port NVMe SSDs, and 2U 4-Node Hyper-Converged NVMe server.

The platform by AIC’s products provides a reliable and high-performance storage solution. The 2U 24-Bay server supports dual-port NVMe SSDs (U.2) with dual controllers support "active/active" operation for instant failover between controller nodes. The platform includes support for 10 GbE, PCIe NTB or SAS communications options. Each controller node supports up to two Intel® Xeon® Processors from the E5-2600 v4 product family. With equipped battery backup and hot-swappable components, system downtime is kept to a minimum even in the event of failure or scheduled maintenance, thereby increasing system availability and delivering substantial savings for system management staff.

Deployed on AIC’s 2U 24-Bay server, E8 Storage’s patented software architecture unlocks the full performance of NVMe drives without sacrificing reliability or availability – features that are critical to enterprise IT data centers. The E8-D24 centralized NVMe storage solution provides the economic and architectural advantages of centralized storage to deliver the high I/O and low latency advantages of PCIe NVMe SSDs. Enterprises benefit from the increased capacity utilization of a centralized solution, avoiding the islands of underutilized storage when deploying local SSDs inside of compute servers. This would also save money by eliminating the need to pre-allocate server capacity for future use at today’s higher prices*1.

Today, the E8-D24 high-availability (HA) centralized NVMe storage solution is deployed by tier-one financial firms on Wall Street *2, and the complete hardware and software solution is now in full production in customer data centers. E8 Storage’s HA and fault-tolerant architecture ensures data availability and business continuity, improving developers’ access to data and increasing productivity. Compared to others, E8 Storage appliances have the advantage of tight hardware integration, improving overall productivity, ease of use and strong TCO. The E8-D24 consolidates storage capacity into a single pool of high-performance flash that is shared among computing resources while delivering performance on par with local SSDs. The result is improved capacity utilization (up to 90%), a reduction in the overall number of drives required, and significant savings to the customer regarding money spent on short- and long-term storage capacity.

“E8 Storage looks for hardware partners that can meet our stringent availability and reliability requirements for our system architecture. AIC’s server products are a strong fit for us, and they have been a strategic partner to E8 Storage during the development of our products,” said Zivan Ori, CEO and Co-Founder, E8 Storage. “We are pleased with the early success of E8 Storage and with the strong support of our partner, AIC.”

The Intel® DC D3700 series dual-port NVMe combined with the E8 Storage HA NVMe Solution achieves NVMe shared storage *3. Intel® DC D3700 Series are very special SSDs to address dual-port PCI Express SSDs High-Availability design. This architecture is used to address a critical redundancy and failover, protecting against to a single path failure. That means that the SSD has a capability to be connected to two hosts at a time, they can be connected directly to a host CPU or via PCIe switch topology if higher SSD count is required. It would look very similar to SAS-based HA storage design but implemented with PCIe bus. Dual-port NVMe is another way for HA topologies. As the product SSD is available in single form factor – 2.5” U.2, sharing similar connector as before. That means it still has four lanes of PCIe Gen3 as in original design, but for dual-port designs, it splits into the pair by 2, so 2 x PCIe Gen3 x2. Therefore the system must have new backplane which has a PCIe properly routed to two hosts with or without PCIe switches to support new connectivity.

Intel® DC D3700 Series SSDs are based on NVMe 1.2 specification, which introduces new features for all NVMe SSDs *4. The one of those is multiple Namespace support. You can make here an analogy with SCSI LUNs, so a single SSD can be partitioned into multiple hardware partitions where a namespace can be assigned to two hosts or otherwise dedicated to a single host. And this allows isolating the partition from another host until a critical failure on assigned host happened. The distributed architecture and software stack allow the customer to achieve full NVMe performance of their remote drives (both throughput and bandwidth) and with minimal impact on NVMe latency (as compared to local NVMe drive usage). The high-performance storage solution scales with capacity while maintaining the same level of performance expected from local storage inside the servers. The disaggregated architecture allows storage capacity to be dynamically allocated, augmented or replaced, without impacting the rack’s performance or requiring maintenance downtime*1.

E8 Storage integrates its rack-scale flash architecture with the Mellanox ConnectX-4 NICs (Network Interface Cards)*1, thus enabling converged networking with very low latency and very high throughput and bandwidth. Since it combines the benefits of local flash and NVMe with the benefits of centralized storage and high availability, this is especially suitable for hyper-scale data centers and large data centers that are deploying NVMe devices today, as well as enterprise and private cloud efforts seeking next-generation All-Flash-Arrays.

“As the industry’s leading provider of high-performance networking technology, Mellanox offers the most efficient end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage,” said Kevin Deierling, Vice President of Marketing, Mellanox Technologies. “Our solutions deliver unmatched throughput and latency and thus improve the overall data center computing efficiency, by delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance. We are pleased to partner with AIC at Computex 2017, and look forward to further collaboration between Mellanox and AIC.”

“AIC is always in the forefront and working towards to new generations of technology. We started to work with Intel as a close partner for years; furthermore, AIC is ready to integrate Intel’s next generation solution for 3D NAND Flash SSDs and Intel® Optane™ Memory Technology into our products, and so on Intel ready to launch,” said Michael Liang, CEO of AIC. “AIC committed to the development of the highest quality products as the goal, strategic alliance for all partners, to provide customers Turnkey Solutions. We offer our products and services as “Hardware Plus Software,” and provide customers the one take solution. Designing the best quality solutions for our customer is always the ultimate goal for AIC’s ongoing effort.”

AIC is committed to the pursuit of continuous innovation and high quality, to meet the global customers and partners of the diverse needs. For more quality products and business opportunities with us, please contact the 2017 Computex AIC booth.

AIC is a leading provider of both standard OTS (off-the-shelf) and OEM/ODM server and storage solutions. With expert in-house design, manufacturing and validation capabilities, AIC’s products are highly flexible and configurable to any form factor, standard or custom. AIC leads the industry with nearly 25 years of experience in mechanical, electronic, system-level engineering, software, as well as a dedication to innovation and customer satisfaction. Headquartered in Taiwan, AIC has offices and operations throughout the United States, China, Russia, and Europe.